And metaphors like cats behind your smile, Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride, Each one a fine gold beast you've hid inside (...)

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of brushes like quail before gunshot.

So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.

The bougainvillea hung about it, purple and magenta, in livid balloons.

I think it took me a long time to realize that you can't really score unless someone passes you the ball. The older you get as a woman, it's fewer and far between. The material isn't there.

If you can't live it down, might as well live it up.

Overcoming negative tendencies and enhancing positive potential are the very essence of the spiritual path.

The danger lies in unconventional experiments signaling for a general license to do as they please, and pass off sloppy workmanship as creative intention.

Applause, applause, life is our cause.

Words are one thing - deeds something entirely different. Fine words are a mask to cover shady deeds. A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

Never start a business just to 'make money'. Start a business to make a difference.

The priest has just baptized you a Christian with water; and I baptize you a Frenchman, daring child, with a dewdrop of champagne on your lips.